Crazy is Relative

Tonight, Miss L. and I brainstormed a photo project. I won't go into details, but it is quite an undertaking, involving 78 images that require planning, staging, models and props, and possibly a lot of post-processing. She is really good at that. I suck, and lack the proper resources anyway. I didn't intend to hang out with her all day, but she got out of work early and I had to pick up some pics from her, so we started hanging out, drinking beer and got into planning a project, something I'd been thinking about for a while, but I needed someone else on board with me and she seems game.

Miss B. came over later, agreed to be one of our models, and helped us brainstorm the images. We talked until about midnight and I drove the relatively short distance home. Perhaps I'm getting old, or more sensible, but driving home on a Saturday night is like taking your life into your hands. I stopped at a light to turn onto Briley Parkway, and whilst there, nearly got hit by not one, but two cars. One truck did a noisy and seemingly last minute u-turn right behind me and another car swerved to miss me and went barrelling through a red light. What the hell? It was like that all the way home. I was minding my own business, driving between the lines and below the speed limit, and all around me, the crazies were out to get me. Where were the cops? Oh, they were probably busy racial-profiling on Charlotte Pike or pulling over people for driving while being Mexican. I was just relieved to get back through my front door in one piece. I had been drinking beer, but not a lot, and over a long period of time, and I felt stone cold sober on the way home. If I hadn't, I'm sure the many near-death experiences I encountered would have sobered me right up.

Things I Have to Have in My Car

My car these days is like a baby. I've always been somewhat bemused by people who have a kid, a tiny little human, and then feel compelled to buy an enormous vehicle to cart around the miniature creature; however, they always say the same thing, that you have to cart around so much stuff when you have a baby. There are pushchairs and carseats and bags and toys and, I don't know because I don't have a kid, but I'm sure the list goes on.

Well, my car is a baby. I have to cart around so much stuff in it these days just to keep it on the road. Here's a list:

A gallon of water
An adjustable wrench
WD 40
Spare bulbs
A GPS
A towel

The gallon of water serves to fill up my leaking water tank caused, apparently, by a faulty water pump (hopefully this will get fixed this weekend). The adjustable wrench helps to get the pressurized cap off the water tank because the pressure creates a vacuum when all the water leaks out.

The WD 40 is for the car's post-flood problems. It now gets finicky when it rains, and I can't drive it through puddles. After it rains, I have to spray all the electricals in the the engine with WD 40 so my car won't sputter out and stall. We've had so much rain lately that this has become a common occurrence and I am learning to be prepared.

Spare bulbs: my tail-light bulbs blow out all the time. I keep spare ones on hand at all times.

The GPS: I have no working speedometer, so my GPS serves as a way to tell me how fast I'm going. Actually, driving a manual car makes it easier to guesstimate what speed you're going, but it makes me feel better when I'm followed by a cop if I actually have some idea.

The towel: I have no air conditioning. I keep the windows cracked, especially when I'm at work all day. Sometimes it rains and I don't know, so keeping a towel handy means I don't have to ride home with a wet bottom.

Despite its aging issues, I still love this car. Just had to mention that.

Post-Flooding in Metrocenter

This river usually has a bank - this was 5 days post-flood. It had risen up all the way to the building I currently "work" in.

You can see how high the water is, but you can't imagine how bad the smell is!

Wine (Whine)

Claire has nothing to say really, other than she has drank an entire bottle of wine, by herself. She thinks that some would raise red flags at this, but she (to quote Shakespeare) bites her thumb at them. Claire's great excursion of the week has been to Aldi, where, in a frenzy of not having gone out anywhere, she spent rather too much money and bought way too much meat and charcoal. Well, she will be well fed for the next couple of weeks.

There's an amazing deal going on in Nashville right now, and it's not Groupon related. Main Street Liquors on Gallatin Road (code name: Ghetto Liquors) has acclimated to its clientele, which is homeless people and East Nashville broke pseudo-yuppies (kind of like myself, but I am not even pseudo-yuppie enough to live in the ENash). My old roommate, who has been mentioned before on this blog, Miss C., introduced me to this place a few years ago. There's an amazing deal there: three bottles of wine for 10.99. It works out at $12 exactly with tax. Back in the day, when we first started going there, you had to pick through the rubbish and the expired stuff to find something semi-decent. I'll admit (and this is a shameless window into my shady personality) to going there before a party to stock up on cheap stuff for people to drink who were too cheap to bring enough booze to satiate themselves at my parties. That was Ghetto Liquor's main function.

However, lately, they have begun to really evaluate their clientele. Now they still have the 3 for 10.99 deal, but they also have more upmarket three-fors. There's a 3 for 13.99 and a 3 for 21.99, and all are wines sold elsewhere in Nashville for much higher prices. The more expensive deals tempt me every time I go in, and I darken their door often these days.

However, as mentioned earlier, this girl works a temp job, for crappy money, but there are still needs that have to be met, and wine is one of them. I require (because I have champagne taste on a Nat Light budget) decent wine and lots of it at a good price. Friends introduced me to Gato Negro, which is a lovely Chilean Sav Blanc for 3 for 10.99. Even my budget and drinking habits can handle that. I love Montez, which is a reminder of past relationship blah de blah de blah, but it's $10 a bottle, and to me, and one of my snobbier friends, Gato Negro tastes just like it.  I hope no one is really reading this blog, because I'm giving away great secrets, which I'm sure will end up on a certain Tennessean's columnist's page (no names mentioned on purpose) and ruin everything. Not having a car is screwing up my plans because tonight I paid the same amount for one bottle of wine here in Old Hickory.

So I started this blog in the third person, which is always a sign that Claire is tipsy. Time to take Claire to bed because she has to get up in the morning and work a totally pointless job. Seriously, Claire has worked out a way to make her job completely obsolete, but shush, don't tell anyone...

Stranded!

I'm stranded between work and home for the next few days and the thought is depressing the hell out of me. I do not want to be home, alone, bored. I'm sure there's plenty I could be doing with my time like cleaning out the sock drawer, or rearranging my CD's into alphabetical order. Or perhaps I could mow my grass or finish some laundry, or remember what the vacuum cleaner looks like.

My parents are borrowing my car. My mother is taking me to work and picking me up again, and at all other times, I am stranded here. I also have hurt my back somehow, so heavy housework and lawn-mowing is not in my immediate future. So tonight, life pretty much sucks. I was hoping to go out and distract myself from my life, if I can't actually divorce it right now, but that plan is pretty much shot. So, I'm in a funk.

What's the funk about, you ask, or maybe you didn't, but I'll tell you anyway. Radio Silence was interrupted by a transmission last week, and it has me funked out. AMWUDM sent a message asking if I was o.k. I replied. He answered "Yup." Two months of not speaking and "Yup." I think my former theory that he's gone completely off his rocker might actually be the most on target. I don't even get a real word? I'm not worthy of a REAL WORD? I guess not, I am just the good time girl after all. That's what he said when we broke up (he really does have a way with words), after months of professing love for me, that "we had a good time." I honestly could have smacked him across the face for that one. Perhaps I should have, maybe it would have knocked some sense into him. Was that supposed to make me feel better? "I broke your heart, but damn, we had a really great time doing it. See ya around kiddo!"

We did have a flood, and it's conceivable, possibly, that I could have drowned, but still, he doesn't care that he broke my heart into a million completely unrecognizable pieces, but he cares that I'm not drowned, or dead, or my house isn't washed away?

I have a nibbling doubt from that, one that creeps forward from the back of my head at inconvenient times, that maybe I am the Good Time Girl. Maybe I'm not the girl men marry or have kids with or hang out with at barbecues with their parents with. Maybe I'm just the Good Time. I drink, I swear, I have a good time. I like to talk about sex and politics and get feisty about both. Perhaps that's not what men want in the girls they marry or settle down with. I should be the demure virgin (whether real or just in demeanor), the Angel of the Household, as the Victorians would have it. It does no good to ponder though, because I'm just not that kind of girl and will never be.

I promise to interrupt my self-indulgent and whiny posts with picture postings soon. I'm working on the 150 or so photographs I uploaded a few days ago and I'm finding the sheer volume a little overwhelming, but I'm getting there, I promise. They are divided into albums, so that's a step in the right direction. Well, me and my very sore back are going to bed with a heavy dose of painkiller.

Oh, the Weekend!

Oh how I hate working. I really begrudge having to work for a living, well, not really, but I begrudge having to keep an 8-5 schedule in a job that I just see as a paycheck. I don't have anything in common with the people I work with - none of them are educated - actually I think the temps are more educated than the full-time people - all of them have millions of kids each - they seem to like their pointless jobs - and I just feel like an outcast, at best. They are really nice people, unlike the people I used to work with at my last crappy temp job, but this still just feels like a place-marker in my life. My life is crying out for me to divorce it. That's what one recently divorced friend told me: "Maybe you need to divorce your life." Maybe so indeed. I'm plotting and planning ways to do it.

On that note, I love weekends. I haven't done anything this weekend except drive around, grill out, and spend time with family. Yesterday I hung out with my mother and we went to Wal Mart to buy her mother's day present, which was a grill, a chimney, and some charcoal; we grilled out steaks on it last night after I put it together. Today I took her over a flat of flowers, because she said she wanted to plant something, and we went out for lunch at this place that I've been driving by for weeks and dying to try. It's a little Mexican restaurant and take-out on Gallatin Road named, quite simply, after its menu items. It's a run-down little place but the draw is its smell. They have a ginormous oil drum barbecue outside on which they are grilling whole chickens night and day and as you drive by, the smell seeps into your soul. Now, you know how I feel about grilled chicken these days, so I just had to try it. I persuaded my mother to step outside of her usual let's-get-take-out routine and actually come with me to this place. We shared a whole grilled chicken, with rice, beans, salad, and tortillas for $11, and it is one of the best meals I have ever had. Wow, it was truly delicious. I am definitely going back.

I have had an affinity lately for restaurants named after menu items: there's my new favourite - Tacos Y Mariscos Y Pollo Al Carbon and the similarly named House of Gyro, Salad, and Hamburger. I think this naming trend might be something to look out for on my constant search for good and unusual cheap eats in Nashville.

New Film, and Floods.

In case you haven't heard, and if you have been listening to national media, there's a good chance you haven't, Nashville flooded this weekend - the entire city and environs of Nashville. It's a 500 year record apparently, although I'm not entirely sure how they know that. I'll write more about that, but I have to make up hours at work tomorrow and get there ridiculously early, so I must sleep soon.

I picked up five rolls of 35mm film yesterday. I'm excited. I have seen some of the pictures and I am sure I will be posting more soon. I knew it was raining pretty hard, but when I drove to Wolf on Saturday, I realized it was a lot worse than I had thought. I didn't get to pick the film up until Tuesday, and as of today, Wednesday night, large parts of Nashville are still underwater.

But.... I am tired. More on all that soon.

Nashville: Signs of Light, Easter 2010, with a Zeiss Ikoflex

These photographs of mid-century signs were taken with my Zeiss Ikoflex, a camera of approximately the same vintage as the signs. The camera isn't in perfect condition either - it has some issues with the viewfinder, and sometimes the shutter sticks, so I think it's the perfect camera to use to take photographs of these decaying, but still strangely beautiful and compelling signs.

This photo epitomizes Dickerson Road, an area replete with seedy liquor stores, discount tobacco, porn stores, thrift, second-hand appliance stores, really good BBQ, crumbling motels and trailer parks. What is the "last chance"? It seems like there's a message here beyond the literal.

The Underbelly of Nashville

 Weiss Liquors in East Nashville. You can't see them, but underneath the sign sits a collection of possibly homeless men who were drinking beverages encased in paper bags from the discount tobacco next door. I tried to include them in one of my shots, but they became suspicious of me and shuffled away behind the building.

The picture above was taken across the street from the Nation of Islam, which was blasting its sermon on Easter Sunday through a loudspeaker. The effect was surreal. This cleaners is on Buchanan Street, which is particularly dangerous part of Nashville. I know because I have an unhealthy addiction to the Metro Crime Maps, and there are always shootings and rapings and pillagings in this area. However, it contains a lot of good photo-fodder.

Ah Dickerson Road, a bastion of old signage and general decrepitness.

Zeiss Pictures from Easter, continued.

This is an abandoned motel near Metrocenter. I would love to go back here and take more pictures.

I got yelled at for taking the picture below. I'm not sure what's so secret about the Bordeaux Motel, or if I want to know what's going on there that you can't take pictures of it from the street.